Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child, by Laura Cumming
When Elizabeth Cumming was 60 years old, she discovered that, as a young child, she had been kidnapped. In 1929, when she was only three years old, someone had lured her from the beach at Chapel St. Leonards, the Lincolnshire village where she was born. Five days later, police retrieved her unharmed from a house 12 miles away. Her abductors had bought her fresh clothes.
Young adults at the time of the discovery, Laura Cumming and her brother accompanied their mother, who had been known as Betty Elston at the time of the abduction, on a visit to Chapel St. Leonards to see what they could learn. They encountered a wall of silence. There were many people still living in the village who remembered the abduction, but no one would talk about it. The family came away with the impression, moreover, that virtually everyone they spoke to knew who had done the abducting. Far from pushing them away, this wall of silence made them more dogged in their investigations.
To sort out what had happened, Laura Cumming could have had at her disposal the following resources:
• Memories
• Oral accounts
• Written documents
• Photographs
However, Betty Elston remembered nothing of the kidnapping, no one was willing to talk, and there were scant records. That left photographs. Fortunately, Betty’s father, George, had a box Brownie and used it to take surprisingly good photos mostly of Betty and of her mother, Veda. Since Laura Cumming is, among other things, art critic for The Observer, she is practised in the art of closely examining images and eliciting from them meanings that are not apparent on their face. As a photographer, I find it instructive to gaze over her shoulder, as it were, as she examines the photographic record produced by her grandfather. It’s a bit of a clinic to observe her in the act of seeing and to observe the thoughts and conclusions her seeing stimulates.
This is a story of assumptions and casual observations that are challenged and finally unseated by closer examination. It is a cautionary tale: don’t accept what is presented to you; look with your own eyes. The casual account, the one a young Betty Elston assumed to be true, went like this: George and Veda had been married for 20 years without children when they adopted Betty who had been born out of wedlock, perhaps to a “fallen” woman. This sort of arrangement happened all the time and was socially useful. The first challenge to the casual account came from Betty herself who saw in a photograph of George such a strong familial resemblance that she could not help but conclude George was her biological father. However, George was a stern authoritarian figure and Betty was reluctant, maybe even afraid, to confront him with her suspicion. Betty kept the matter to herself and George died without ever learning that Betty knew the truth of their relationship.
From there, the account underwent a major revision. George had engaged in an indiscretion with a young local woman named Hilda Blanchard who gave birth to a daughter whom she named Grace. George was a domineering sort who forced Hilda to give up the child. Hilda tried to stay away but missed her daughter and so orchestrated a kidnapping. In response, George retained a solicitor who drafted an agreement (probably unenforceable) prohibiting Hilda and her family from ever having contact with Grace/Betty. A few weeks later, Hilda emigrated to Australia where she settled and had a family, leaving the Elstons to raise Betty as their own. However, like a good Henry James story, the narrative undergoes another turn of the screw. A further examination of the photographic record shows that even the revised account is unsupportable.
I’ll say no more, as that would be unfair to prospective readers. I’ll only note that, in addition to the photographic record, what requires close scrutiny is the way we allow our interpretation of events to conform to the lazy moralizing of our prevailing middle-class culture. Instead, I’ll turn my attention to a peculiar trope that plays here and there through the book. It is a photographic trope and, for that reason, provokes my photographic brain to look more closely at the question it raises. It plays on the distinction between black and white and colour photographs and the meanings each format suggests. At p. 212, Cumming writes:
“Black-and-white photographs seal people into a colorless world, as if they saw life that way too. The mind knows this is false, but the optic nerve is fooled into finding these figures less real, immediate, vital. Monochrome turns the present into the past, makes the past look even more distant.”
Elsewhere, she uses the phrase “reductive as a monochrome photograph.” Later, still, she says: “I can’t picture that in black and white.” What she can’t picture in black and white is the possibility that her mother’s biological parents, Hilda and George, may have been more emotionally entangled than suits the standard tale of village gossips. Finally, Cumming observes: “My mother’s childhood was given to me as a black-and-white fable, and I am trying to confuse it with color.” Black and white photographs represent a world which lies in the past. It is remote from present day concerns, less emotionally laden. It is a world uncomplicated by messy exchanges and ambiguous moral considerations. Add colour, and the represented world feels more immediate, more complicated.
Cumming’s distinction between black and white and colour reminds me of an analogous distinction in another context. In How Fiction Works, the writer and literary critic, James Wood, introduces a contemporary genre of literary fiction which he dubs commercial realism. Authors achieve an effect of realism in their work through a superabundance of detail. A character doesn’t open a door; the character opens a door which has been rendered in granularity and precision. It isn’t a generic door nor a Platonic door, but this door, unique in space and time. Working by analogy to visual media, one might argue that colour adds a layer of detail to photographs which renders them more real. Contemporary tools push that even further. High resolution image sensors produce such granular detail that the resulting images have an unprecedented clarity. Algorithmic tricks, like HDR and focus stacking, push this to the very limit. Today’s photographic conventions, like their literary counterparts, have an absolute fetish for the really real.
Cumming doesn’t take the trope too seriously. As she says, “[t]he mind knows this is false.” As if to underscore this point, she includes in her reflections black and white renderings of two paintings which, in the “real world,” are colour images. In all likelihood, the reason for this is to save on printing costs. Despite this irony, the images prove no less useful for being black and white.
In the world of photography, not everyone shares Cummings relaxed attitude towards the black and white/colour divide. Dogmatists abound, especially in the sub genre of street photography where the adoption of black and white has become the dominant convention. If I post a street photo to one of my social media accounts and fail to include hashtags that clearly mark it out as black and white, the image goes largely ignored. I’m hard pressed to name a reason for the resurgence of black and white photography. Maybe practical considerations have an influence. Many purists shoot film and black and white is cheaper/easier to develop. If they shoot with the intention of producing photo books, they are also cheaper to print. Practical exigencies aside, maybe Cumming’s account of black and white applies here: a preference for things past, for a less immediate engagement with the subject, for a sense of simplicity. In this regard, maybe it represents a rebellion against technological onslaught and media inundation. I don’t know. I’m not sure it matters. In the end, a photograph is equally susceptible of interpretation whether it is rendered in black and white or in colour. The more we ask of it, the more it yields.